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get to know thyself

Knowing myself, my history, my interests, I would have thought I'd be very interested in bookplates. Book related, artistic, collectible, and each with its own story. How could I not love them?

With this mindset, I started following Confessions of a Book Plate Junkie a few months ago, and wow, it is hard to express how little I care. That "Ooh, shiny!" moment carried me through about 2.5 posts, after which I dutifully tried to read each post. Even that I could not maintain, and I have subsequently skimmed to see if anything interested me. It didn't.

I'll be dropping the blog, and it will have no effect on the world. The reason I make note of the incident is that I still think bookplates should be interesting to me. I don't really understand why they are not. None of the reasons I thought they would be have changed. They are a little dry as a topic, but I am perfectly capable of immersing myself in plenty of things that are equally arcane as well as fascinating only to a handful of others, if that. It's tempting to blame the blogger, but the writing is perfectly fine, he writes well about his love of bookplates, and even if he didn't, bad writing wouldn't put me off of something I actually cared about. I was primed to care about bookplates. Why don't I?

I may never know, because I am done thinking about it. The fact is, I'm not even interested enough in bookplates to figure out why I'm not interested in them. I think I've been hurting for a lack of introspection due to a decrease in writing, but bookplates obviously are not the place where I will resume my former navel gazing. My indifference just is. I can accept that, even though it puzzles me.

One interesting facet of the internet that I hadn't really considered until now is that you can easily bury yourself in all manner of things that were once rarefied... and thus have opportunities you never could before to have that awakening moment of, "What on earth have I got all over myself?"